American Classic Car

[pedro]

planning a road trip from Sanfrancisco to LA in august.

Do you know where i can rent an old american car? like an old mustang from the 1960's or 70's?

thanks

[Midwest Michael]

Welcome to the RTA Forum!

The simple answer is that renting such a car simply isn't possible. Because of the un-reliability and cost to maintain such a car, its just not possible for companies to use "classic" cars in a rental fleet and be profitable.

I believe there may be a company or two that actually does rent such classics in the LA area, as part of an extremely high-end exotic car line. However, in this case the rental is not really designed for a roadtrip and you will not be able to use one for a one way rental, and if available at all, I can promise that such a rental would cost several hundred to nearly $1000 per day, with a very small limit on the number of miles you can drive it.

[Midwest Michael]

I looked around a little bit and found exactly one company that would work for what you want to do - if you've got an unlimited budget.

The company is based out of LA, but they have a 72 Mustang, and note that they will drop a car off in San Francisco on special request.

The price is $400 per day, however, and only includes 50 miles per day. Its 50 cents per mile after that. So if you were going to do the trip in one day, the rental would cost you at least $600, and that's before whatever they charge to deliver the car to SF, plus taxes, and an underage driver fee if that's an issue too.

[pedro]

didnt realise itd be that expensice.. most of these cars are worth less than $20k.. anyways, do you have their contact details/website?


thanks

[Lifemagician]

didnt realise itd be that expensice.. most of these cars are worth less than $20k..

It is not the value of the car, on which it is based. You have to remember that these cars are much more to keep up, and probably have expensive work done to make sure they comply with modern requirements.

The low mileage allowance is likely to be because these cars are used almost exclusively for weddings, birthdays, graduations and such celebrations.

Lifey who drove wedding cars

[Midwest Michael]

Lifey summed it up quite nicely, these cars are generally not rented to be used on roadtrips.

I'd also say that the value of these cars could very well be more than $20k in most cases, because they really need to be in virtually perfect condition to be used as a rental. A Classic car in perfect condition could very well reach into that price range or far beyond. But more importantly, as I mentioned before, the cost to maintain this kind of car is extremely high, and it can't be profitable to use them as a rental unless they are charging an extreme premium.

In any case, this is the company I found. Again, I have zero experience with them, just found them via google, so its not by any means a recommendation.

[pedro]

ok thanks both